New wireless technology is being developed and deployed to provide support for voice and multimedia services in both residential and enterprise environments. Wireless Local Area Network (“WLAN”) devices, for example, are being developed in conjunction with IEEE 802.11 standards to support packetized voice communications such as Voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”). There are technological hurdles that must be overcome in order to support voice and multimedia on WLANs because the technology was initially designed to support simple data communications. In particular, voice and multimedia applications can be more sensitive to jitter, delay and packet loss than data communications applications. IEEE 802.11 specifies protocols and techniques for overcoming some of these technological hurdles.
Because the costs associated with developing, purchasing, selling and deploying a new wireless technology are often quite high, it is common to conduct testing to mitigate the risk that the technology will fail to perform as planned. However, wireless devices are notoriously difficult to test because they can be affected by ambient sources of interference. Further, the different combinations of conditions to which a wireless device may be subjected in actual use is so great in number that it is difficult and time-consuming to create all of those conditions in a test environment. It is known, for example, to simulate some wireless network operations by manually moving a wireless device through a building in which wireless access devices are strategically situated. However, this technique is too labor intensive and imprecise to simulate a wide variety of traffic conditions, distances between access points and rates of motion in a practical manner. Further, such a manual, open-air test can be rendered invalid by transient interference from a microwave, RADAR or other RF source. More recently it has become known to simulate a wireless network by enclosing devices in EMI-shielded containers which are in communication via wired connections. Attenuators and combiners are employed to simulate a selected distance between devices. Such a system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,724,730, which is incorporated herein by reference.